Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 55

Discussed earlier was patriarchy as evident within households through the unfair division of labor. Heterosexuality, in fact, was condemned by some feminists as an institution key in maintaining women's subordination (Koedt 1970; Rich 1980; Dworkin 1987; MacKinnon 1989; Firestone 1993).

While MacKinnon and Dworkin as well as activists like Anne Koedt have contended that under patriarchy all heterosexual sex contains some element of coercion (Koedt 1970; Dworkin 1987; MacKinnon 1989), some theorists go so far as to argue, in fact, that all intercourse is rape. In 1975, Sharon Deevey argued “every fuck is a rape even if it feels nice because every man has power and privilege over women, whether he uses it blatantly or subtly” (Deevey 1975, p. 24). Deevey's position is one of several drivers of political lesbianism: radical feminist women who choose to devote their energies away from men and toward women; something articulated in 1981 by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists:

We do think all feminists can and should be political lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman‐identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women … Attached to all forms of sexual behaviour are meanings of dominance and submission, power and powerlessness, conquest and humiliation … [It] is specifically through sexuality that the fundamental oppression, that of men over women, is maintained.

(Leeds Revolutionary Feminists 1981, p. 5)

The Leeds Revolutionary Feminists argued that “Penetration is an act of great symbolic significance by which the oppressor enters the body of the oppressed” (p. 6) and that “Every woman who lives with or fucks a man helps to maintain the oppression of her sisters and hinders our struggle” (p. 7).

Separating physically, sexually, and emotionally from men became a way for radical feminists to free up resources and energies for the movement while also helping to dismantle a patriarchal institution.